MOVIE REVIEW: Boring story renders 'Ida' uninvolving

Friday

Jun 6, 2014 at 6:00 AMJun 11, 2014 at 3:07 PM

The story of a Polish nun discovering the truth about her past suffers from a weak script.

By Al AlexanderFor The Patriot Ledger

There’s a good movie to be made about the back-to-back evils wreaked upon Poland by the Nazi and Soviet regimes, but “Ida” just ain’t it. Yes, I know it’s receiving sparkling reviews, but director Pawel Pawlikowski’s ode to his homeland is not only puerile and preposterous, it’s also trite and insensitive to Jews and Catholics. But, boy, does his film look terrific, shot in gorgeous black and white and formatted in a 4:3 ratio that makes it look like it was filmed way back in 1962, the year in which the story is set.

It also boasts two crackerjack performances by Agata Kulesza and striking newcomer Agata Trzebuchowska, a fresh-faced teen who was allegedly discovered – shades of old Hollywood – in a Warsaw coffee shop. Not only is she a gaminesque beauty, she’s also one helluva an actress, which makes it all the more frustrating that the script by Pawlikowski and Rebecca Lenkiewicz is so shot full of holes. In it, Trzebuchowska plays an 18-year-old novice nun one week short of her final vows. Her name is Anna, and before making that lifetime commitment, Mother Superior insists that the orphaned Anna travel to Lodz to meet the communist aunt (Kulesza) she never knew she had.

There rests the first of the script’s many holes. Why would the nunnery wait so long to tell Anna about her long-lost relative? Yet, that might have been forgivable if the tale didn’t turn so doggone ridiculous, beginning with Anna learning for the first time that she’s indeed Jewish and her real name is Ida Lebenstein. Again, why would they keep that from her? Was the abbey beneath its recruitment level and in need of keeping her cloistered at all costs? It just doesn’t add up. Neither does the road trip Anna/Ida takes with her Aunt Wanda to the family homestead, now occupied by the trashy clan that first hid, then killed, Anna/Ida’s parents during the Nazi occupation.

Along the way, the women pick up a handsome, hitchhiking sax player (Dawid Ogrodnik) who turns out to be a dreamboat, natch. And the way he plays Coltrane is nearly enough to persuade the virginal Anna/Ida to exchange her habits for a roll in the sheets. Assuming Aunt Wanda, a Soviet judge by day, and a self-confessed “slut” by night, doesn’t get to the dude first.

It continues to get harder to buy the pap Pawlikowski’s selling, as he reaches deep into his bag of ludicrous plot points, beginning with the slayer of Anna/Ida’s parents presenting a “shocking” deal: In exchange for letting the killer keep her folks’ farm, he will show the woman where he buried the bodies – and dig them up to boot. The excavation yields but a few bones, which the women promptly wrap in shawls and stash in the trunk of their proletariat-style sedan. Excuse me if I’m being too logical, but wouldn’t it make more sense to simply call the police? It only gets worse, as this mercifully short 80-minute snoozefest enters an almost darkly comic third act in which a person leaps out a window and Anna/Ida indulges in a night of sexual and substance-abusing debauchery before strolling back to the convent. Not only is it all silly, it doesn’t make a lick of sense in the context of the story. It’s as if Pawlikowski (director of the vastly superior “My Summer of Love”) decided to make stuff up as he went along.

Clearly, the point he’s attempting to make via the two women is that one is oppressed by an unyielding Soviet regime and the other by a religion that’s not even her birthright. But it all feels rote and uninvolving, stirring unintended giggles instead of the tears he so desperately seeks. It’s such a waste, too, because the look, the mood and the subject matter are worthy of so much more than “Ida” offers, which is sadly as dull and austere as life in the Soviet Union.